Commentary on Political Economy

Friday, 25 May 2012

The Philosophy of the Flesh: Notes on Merleau-Ponty and Agamben

These notes are meant to show that we are not standing still on the promised "autonomist ontology". Apologies for the quotations in French and Portuguese. These links are useful:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/40403053/Merleau-Ponty-Reader

http://www.scribd.com/doc/76522370/Agamben-Giorgio-Homo-Sacer-English

Kant regresses back into Cartesian dualism
by simply positing the “finitude” of
the per-cipient subject and the “noumenality”, the incom-prehensibility of the
per-ceived Object, of Being in its “totality”. This is the kernel of what we
may call (with Merleau-Ponty) “the transcendental attitude”. Kant distinguishes
two “moments” (momenta) of experience, one being the “constitutive”
(perception) and the other the “regulative” (concepts or theory). This
“separation” (or chorismos) of
perception and the perceived, of the percipi
and the esse, already pre-supposes a
dualism of perceiving Subject and perceived Object. The act of perception is
founded on the logical presupposition that there is a “thing” that is to be
perceived – the Object. And the logical requirement of the act of perceiving is
that there be an “entity”, a Subject, that “does” the perceiving. Whereas
Descartes had placed the Ego or the Soul at the summit of philosophy, Kant
preferred to appoint the logico-mathematical powers of human thought. It is the
very ec-sistence of logico-mathematical id-entities that are within life and
the world, within experience, and yet are independent of experience for their
“truth” or “validity” – it is this a
priori ec-sistence of logico-mathematical rules or laws that confirms the
ec-sistence of two separate yet inextricable aspects of human existence: the constitutive principle of experience and
the regulative principle of theory,
the awareness or intuition of the res
or “things”and the cognitive ability to link these “things” according to
cognitive rules. There exists therefore both a faculty that “links” or
“con-nects” ideas between themselves, and a faculty that links or connects
these “ideas” with “things”, and an entity that pro-duces these “ideas” (the
Sub-ject) as well as the “things” (that are ordered and connected) in themselves! Here Being is seen as
“pre-sence”, as a fixed entity: what is forgotten is that the only “fixity” is
that of the “degree zero” of being, which is its “being-for-others”, its
perceptibility and not some kind of “nothing-ness” (Heidegger), as even
Merleau-Ponty ends up mistaking it:

Merleau-Ponty, like Heidegger and Husserl
and Hegel before them, continues to approach the question of being in its “verticality”,
its transcendence – and so betrays his own enterprise. (Arendt speaks of “depth”
[or ‘true being’] and “surfaces” [or ‘mere appearances’] to distinguish between
transcendence and immanence [see ‘LotM’, p26 and p30 on “the value of the
surface”]. Negri adopts this term, too in his writings on Spinoza.) Had he
turned to the immanentists, he would have understood more fully what he himself
sustains below when he substitutes “visible
et invisible” for “etre et neant”
– the impossibility of Being ec-sisting in its “totality”, as “pre-sence” that
would render the pre-sent (the nunc stans) meaningless, as “un etre sans restriction”; - and
therefore the futility or irrelevance of transcendentalism:

The limit of
Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of perception can be sensed in his failure to
appreciate how the notion of “becoming” in Nietzsche’s version of the concept
does not leave “the sensible, time and history” untouched but trans-values them
quite radically:

But Merleau-Ponty’s interesting notion of
“invisibility” as “the degree zero of visibility” leads us back to the
discussion over Schmitt’s “exception” and Hobbes’s “hypothesis” and Nietzsche’s
Invariance – all of which are “border” or “liminal” concepts, as it were, and
offer revealing radiographies of the bourgeois transcendental and ontogenetic
understanding of human being. Having
just stated that “quand je parle du
néant, il y a déjà de l’être”,Merleau-Ponty
remains locked in the transcendental attitude that he attempts to supersede
because he remains tied to the Heideggerian phenomenological notion of
“nothing-ness”: if “being is in motion”,
if it is a “be-coming”, then there must also be a non-being that pre-supposes
being, which is the “space” left “empty” by the pre-sent being understood as a fixity. Similarly, “in-visibility”
has meaning or “sense” only in the light
of visibility (“la lueure de l’etre”, an echo of Heidegger’s Lichtung). Merleau-Ponty has a vice of falling into these delusional
dualisms as when he speaks of “silence” enveloping “words”, for meaning or “sens” as “l’etre d’enveloppement” and the Platonic “anamnesis” (cf. his
expressions above, at p.28 of ‘Signes’).

It is interesting also that Foucault and
then Agamben (Homo Sacer) mistake
this “degree zero” for some puerile pre-political “state of innocence” that has
been tainted by “statality”, by civil society as “bourgeois society”, as a
degeneration or de-secration from “zoe” to “bios”. In effect, Agamben et alii erect a “naked life” as a
bulwark against the “fiction” of citizenship
that de-fines the “border” between the state of legality and that of
“exception”.

Despite his appeals to the authoriality of Hannah Arendt (for he is
a master at seeking out associations with “authors” such as Heidegger and Deleuze),
Agamben neglects the cardinal importance that Arendt gave precisely to the
concept of “citizenship”, not as a mark of biopolitical repression, but indeed
as the only realistic and real “protection” of a human being by a human
community! There is no reference in Arendt to this “primacy of natural life” to
which Agamben refers (p.4). Little wonder that he should complain (same page)
that “Arendt establishes no connection” between the analyses in ‘HC’ and in
‘OT’! The Nazi concentration camps operated not on the basis that “citizenship”
was denied to the Jews, as Agamben foolishly believes, but precisely on the
Nietzschean and later Schmittian notion that society and its “ontogeny of
thought” are fictitious “masks” that serve to dissemble the “nakedness” of life
as exploitation! Though this debacle may have begun with the progressive emargination of social groups from the
protection of citizenship, as Arendt genially showed, the Nazis never saw Jews
as “people deprived of citizenship” – and they never meant thereby “to exclude”
them from any kind of biopolitical “statality” or “statal power”. The Nazis quite simply ob-literated the very
notion of “citizenship” altogether! – In such a way that the Jews became in
their eyes the “innocent” (Unschuldig!) victims of the struggle for life, the
war of all against all, - the state of nature that is exactly what Agamben’s
notion of “nuda vita” and Foucault’s earlier Aristotelian one of “zoe”
ineluctably revive! In the Nazi ideology, Jews were merely the representatives
of a losing “slave morality” that were to be dominated by the homologously
“ir-responsible” or “un-accountable” (un-ver-antwort-lich)
Nazi “Arian” bearers of the “master morality”! To lump together political
systems that retain the notion of “citizenship” with systems like the Nazi
state that abolished citizenship completely is to commit a political
misjudgement of the worst possible kind! The puerility of Agamben’s “late-romantic”
Rousseauean reveries is of an almost
unbearable naivete’ – something that Nietzsche exposed and ridiculed with “the
ontogeny of thought” which shows, in a manner later rejuvenated by Arendt, the
(sit venia verbo!) “nakedness”
(allusion to Agamben’s “nuda vita” or
naked life) of the violence that the bourgeois transcendental attitude and
ontogeny unleashes on beings human
because of its equally “naked” denigration and denial of any phylogenetic inter esse, let alone
“citizenship”! Nietzsche falsely believed to be able to overcome the nihilism of
Western thought by exposing its Invariance: in reality, however, he only ended
up identifying the ineluctability of exploitation and of “the pathos of
distance”, as well as the instrumentality of the capitalist logico-mathematical
and scientific order. (Esposito, incidentally, has sought to redefine inter esse as comunitas, with the emphasis on the munere which preserves the social individuality of the esse and shifts the political emphasis
from the inter.)

In fact here even the “la” of “la pensee”
ought to be in cursive – because if languages interpenetrate thoughts, then it
is foolhardy to postulate the existence of “one” thought: there are as many
“thoughts” as there are words to articulate and express them. Merleau-Ponty
obliquely argues as much when he rightly observes that there cannot be any
plausible analytical distinction between synchronic “parole” and diachronic
“langue” a’ la Saussure. (See generally
“Le Phenomene du Langage” in Signes,
p.85:

Here once again Merleau-Ponty seems unable
to distinguish between human ana-lysis – literally, the retrovisual
categorization of reality that ends up in the prima philosophia (ontology) and the “reality” that is the
“fundament” or even the “abyss” of thought and language and action, in short,
of what may be called the point of intuition, the reality of perception.